Aussies Determined to Expose the Great Wind Power Fraud! Go Senator Leyonhjelm!

December 4, 2014December 4, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Alan Jones interviews David Leyonhjelm on the Senate’s Inquiry Into the Great Wind Power Fraud & Cross-Bench LRET Plan

December 4, 2014 by stopthesethings 2 Comments

The wind industry in Australia is in full-scale panic because the Senate’s cross-benchers (who hold the balance of power in the Upper House) have won Coalition support for their Inquiry into the great wind power fraud: which will turn a (long-overdue) blowtorch on the biggest rort in Australian history (see our post here).

Adding to the wind industry’s mounting woes is the fact that the cross-benchers have also put together a plan that will put the wind industry out of its misery, by elevating the place of “old” hydro power and small-scale solar – especially “stand alone solar” in remote locations – under the Large-Scale Renewable Energy Target (LRET): both “old” hydro and small-scale solar are perversely excluded from the LRET (the plan is available here).

The vast bulk of hydro capacity was built pre-1998 and is, therefore, ineligible to participate – a matter that has Tasmanian Senator, Jacqui Lambie seeing red (see our posts here and here). For a run down on the Inquiry and the cross-benchers’ plan see our post here.

STT hears that the cross-bench plan is with Tony Abbott’s office and has already won the PM’s tick of approval.

The Inquiry and the plan has been pushed along by cross-bench Senator, David Leyonhelm, who appears in this recent interview with Alan Jones on 2GB.

Alan has a little radio show that more than just a few Australians tune into each morning. Syndicated through over 77 Stations and with close to 2 million listeners Countrywide – AJ as he’s known – is one of those people that leads the political charge on many issues that really affect ordinary Australians and which the rest of the press ignore.

Alan Jones AO: A couple of weeks ago I interviewed Dr Jay Tibbetts – you might recall is an American. A medicical adviser to the Brown County Health Department in Wisconsin. He attacked the Australian Medical Association, who quite disgracefully, but not surprisingly given that the leadership of that mob now is hopelessly of the left. And the AMA virtually arguing that there was no problem with these sub-audibleinfra-sound emitted by wind turbines. And Doctor Tibbetts cited endless international evidence in relation to the health risks posed by the low-frequency noise that wind turbines generate.

Well that interview lead to an email that I received this week from eastern Europe. Amazingly they had heard my interview, on the Internet with Doctor Tibbetts in relation to what I call the lunacy of wind farms and the sleep deprivation that they cause and my email correspondent said “I just wanted to tell you how much we appreciated your excellent interview and your courage to do it. I know how risky this is. My emailer said he posted the interview on his website and it went ballistic. And I’m told, he says it’s spreading from Austria to Germany, and Finland and Ireland and Poland and many other countries. My emailer said ‘I can guarantee you that all people in Europe, especially in Germany were like crazy and spread your interview like crazy when they got it on my Facebook page.

Well people are waking up to the lies and deceit peddled by governments and renewable energy companies all over the world. There is a report this week by AGL energy of all outfits who found that non-solar households are paying hidden subsidies and more than $200 million a year, here in Australia to households who have solar roofing panels. Now we know that this wind power-solar power are driving up the cost of what you pay for electricity and what business pays. And the AGL Chief economist Paul Simshauser, said the problem of wealth transfers to renewable energy sources was increasing. In other words to prop up renewable energy, you the taxpayer have money taken out of your pocket and that, in billions of dollars, goes to renewable energy companies. Most of them foreign companies.

Now people increasingly can’t hack this. We’re told 650 electricity customers are complaining to their retailer every day about electricity prices. The Australian Energy Regulator’s annual report found disconnections have surged and more than 237,000 New South Wales households, one in seven customers, has complained to their provider about pricing in the financial year ended 30 June this year.

Now we are spending billions of dollars on wind energy. It accounts for less than 2% of power generation in China, 3% in America. And this whole renewable energy thing is completely out of control. Wind power costs up to $214 per megawatt hour, coal $78 to $91. If the renewable energy mob want a set of rules that would be simple – then go ahead with your wind farm but don’t ask for taxpayers’ money. How can wind turbine companies buy off a farmer for $10,000 a turbine and then that same company be subsidised by the taxpayers? Who are you.

I have spoken to so many people, but one of them is Andrew Gardiner in Napthine’s electorate. He’s running for election this Saturday, the Premier of Victoria. Next to 140 turbines, 150 metres high, 56m blades – the biggest monsters in the southern hemisphere, some are 90 m from his property. Eight of them, 1.7 km from his home. And he’s been bullied and intimidated by AGL. I repeat – coal-fired power $78-91 a megawatt hour wind power, up to $214 per megawatt hour and solar power, over $400 a megawatt hour.

And here you’ve got this Gullen Range wind farm near Goulburn, which breaks nearly every rule that governed its application to operate. But don’t worry, it’s foreign owned. Would you believe Canberra, were meant to be spending 17,000 million dollars (17 billion), erecting between 7000 and 10,000 of these wind turbines. Yet Germany are pushing ahead with new coal-fired electricity plants because political and public concern there is increasing over the cost of energy. China is building a new coal fired power station every 10 days every year. And remember when I spoke to Angus Taylor, the new member for Hume, turbines in his electorate enjoys subsidies to $500,000,000 to a $billion a year.

Well David Leyonhjelm is a New South Wales Senator, representing the Liberal Democrats and along with Senators Madigan, Day, Xenophon and Back, David Leyonhjelm succeeded in establishing, has succeeded in establishing – and this will put a few noses out of joint – a Senate inquiry into wind turbines. This will blow the whole show open. It was a narrow vote. Because you see people like Mcfarlane, the Energy Minister, they’re in bed with wind companies. 33 to 32. The inquiry will be known as The Select Committee on Wind Turbines. It will investigate regulatory governance, or lack of it, over wind turbines, their economic impact, which can only be negative. It will examine on household power prices of wind power, we know that. The implementation of planning processes which as you can see with Gullen Range, are ignored. The integrity of national wind farm guidelines – they have none. The impact of wind turbines on firefighting – that’s another story altogether – and crop management. And the committee will have the power to send for and examine people and documents. And it will report its proceedings from time to time and make interim recommendations and it will report by June 24 next year. This is a very pioneering and important initiative and not before time.

Senator David Leyonhjelm is on the line. Senator, good morning.

Senator David Leyonhjelm: Good morning Alan.

Alan Jones AO: Just before we go down to the guts of this, I note the notice paper and it tells us that the inquiry will look into ‘the role and capacity of the National Health & Medical Research Council in providing guidance to state and territory authorities’ and ‘the effect that wind towers have on fauna and aerial operations around wind turbines’. I couldn’t find any where in the terms of reference of the inquiry an investigation into the health impact of these wind turbines. Is that on your agenda?

Senator David Leyonhjelm: It’s on our agenda and there is another item there that says ‘Any related matter’. So it certainly we’ll be taking that into account. The only thing is we – the emphasis of this inquiry is towards the other matters, more than health, because there have been two inquiries into health already. The problem with it is they’ve been ignored pretty much.

Alan Jones AO: Absolutely.

Senator David Leyonhjelm: We didn’t think – we will be going over that ground, we will be looking at that again – but there are a lot of additional complaints about wind farms. They are, I don’t know where they all are, all but certainly some of them are extremely noxious neighbours. And we are receiving just so many complaints about them.

Alan Jones AO: Absolutely, I am to. I have a file that I couldn’t jump over here too. Incidentally, as you would be aware there is an election here on Saturday, this opposition leader, fellow, Andrews, the Labor leader, is promising to reduce the mandatory buffer zone between properties and wind farms if he wins the election. I mean it is currently 2 km the exclusion zone, which is not enough, he’s promised to reduce it to 1 km.

Senator David Leyonhjelm: It’s amazing. And, you know that reflects the way we did this committee. We knew that there’s significant support for wind farms on both sides of the house. And what we did was a little bit sneaky to be quite frank. We’ve called it a ‘select committee’, so it’s not a reference to an existing standing committee, which are dominated by Labor and the government, so this is basically a cross-bench inquiry. There are seven official members of the committee, plus we can co-opt more, other participating members. It’s only two from the government one from Labor, one from the Greens, and three from the cross-bench. And plus, we can bring in other participating cross-bench members if if we wish to.

Alan Jones AO: But see you’re raising a very valid point here because the public feel that they’ve got nowhere to turn because both Labor and the Coalition are in bed with this mob.

Senator David Leyonhjelm: Yes, well that’s the point. That’s why we said this that it’s not going to be appropriate for it to go to an existing committee, because the cross-bench doesn’t have much say on those.

Alan Jones AO: Absolutely. You see I have said many times – I am talking to Senator David Leyonhjelm from New South Wales – I’ve said many times David, that you can’t release a drug onto the market unless all the likely consequences from the drug are subjected to rigourous scrutiny. So how could you build wind farmers, or approve coal seam gas extraction, without providing the answers to the very legitimate questions about health and the impact on individuals that these things have.

Senator David Leyonhjelm: Yes. You can never answer every single question and science is an endless pursuit, but there are some just glaring questions why, for example, does the Gullen Range wind farm, where they have put these things almost 200m away from where they’re supposed to be, and then said ‘well, we’re a renewable energy company we can do whatever we like’. And then the Clean Energy Regulator hands over money to them with no accounting.

Alan Jones AO: Thank God for you. Thank God for you. They should be stopped in their tracks now. They are in breach of the consent application, they should be stopped, shouldn’t they?

Senator David Leyonhjelm: We hear lots of stories, where because they are renewable energy, they think they’re above the law. They don’t think they have to comply with planning guidelines and directions and so forth.

Alan Jones AO: This bloke’s a breath of fresh air.

Senator David Leyonhjelm: We are not even satisfied those guidelines are particularly comprehensive and thorough anyway.

Alan Jones AO: Or stringent, no. You have said, just for the benefit of my listeners, and I’ll just get you to comment on some of the quotes that you’re on the record as having uttered. “The dramatic surge in power bills has been major factor in the decline of our manufacturing sector and the loss of thousands of jobs. In little more than 10 years, the Renewable Energy Target has rocketed Australia from almost the cheapest to the most expensive electricity in the world”. They are your words.

Senator David Leyonhjelm: Yes. Well in fact that brings me to another subject where also the cross-bench is also are trying to do something constructive with the government on this Renewable Energy Target. As you probably know, Labor and the government stopped negotiating a week or so back and now, it’s in our court. We are working on a plan – there’s been some media reports on it in the last couple of days. We are working on a plan in whcih we will address this issue of high prices of electricity, unachievable energy target, the penalty rates kicking in, all that sort of nonsense.

Alan Jones AO: Well you said in August, ‘The latest figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show in the five years to June 2012, Australian retail electricity prices rose by 72%, with even higher increases in Melbourne and Sydney’. You said, ‘Senators and MPs, however, don’t need to worry about whether staying warm in chilly Canberra may send them broke. Perhaps if they had to pay for their own heating and air-conditioning in Parliament House it would concentrate their minds on the important discussion we need to have about the future of the Renewable Energy Target’. Good on you.

Senator David Leyonhjelm: Well, it’s tragic. You know there are people who are suffering, genuinely suffering from energy poverty. They cannot turn on their heaters during the winter. They suffer in the cold just because they cannot afford their electricity bills. So they’re frightened of receiving a bill that they can’t afford to pay.

Alan Jones AO: Absolutely. You … yes it is tragic. You quote a report from the accounting firm Deloittes, showing the Renewable Energy Target will “stifle the economy, cost jobs, and drive up prices and is a very inefficient means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions”. Now Terry McCrann years ago told me David, on this program, if you want to decarbonise the Australian economy, you’re writing a national suicide note. And I mean that you’re the only people focusing on this issue.

Senator David Leyonhjelm: Yes, well somebody has to. I’m really encouraged, that the government acknowledges the problem, I just don’t like the solution, or the politics of the solution. The renewable energy industry has an awful lot of supporters. And it’s a nice warm thing motherhood type stuff to support renewable energy.

Alan Jones AO: And have you ever noticed, when any of the MPs retires from Parliament they go and get jobs with them. Hey hey? Oh, Mr Mcfarlane will be lining one up right now. He won’t be standing at the next election don’t worry. I mean you said, and this is true, ‘the net effect of this subsidy, renewable energy subsidies, is to hand an additional 17 billion dollars of our money to these companies over 15 years for no measurable environmental benefit.

Senator David Leyonhjelm: Yes that’s right. And it’s worse than that, I mean it’s having negative effects. In fact one of the aspects of the inquiry is to actually determine what is the energy and emission output – input and output from a whole of life. So, from the point when these turbines are made and they run, through to the other end when they are dismantled and thrown on the scrap heap – what’s the net energy and emission output.

Alan Jones AO: Absolutely

Senator David Leyonhjelm: I have a sneaky suspicion that a bit like the Prius car it’s not the right direction.

Alan Jones AO: Absolutely. Finally – and we could go on forever on the things that you’ve said. And it’s very encouraging that someone at least is taking this cause up. But you’ve said, “It is undisputed that the wind generation industry is not viable anywhere in the world without government or customer subsidies”, you said “It’s just government-mandated corporate welfare”.

Senator David Leyonhjelm: That’s exactly right – they’re just not viable without subsidies.

Alan Jones AO: Keep at it – keep at it my friend. Keep at it. You’re the hope of the side.

Senator David Leyonhjelm: Alright – thanks Alan.

Alan Jones AO: Well done, there he is. Senator David Leyonhjelm. A major senate inquiry into this whole rubbish of renewable energy and wind power.
2GB

What the Global Warming Alarmists Don’t Want You To Know!

December 1, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Atmospheric Concentration of Carbon Dioxide

ATMOSPHERIC CONCENTRATION OF CARBON DIOXIDE

Written by Dr Vincent Gray on 29 Nov 2014

Early chemical measurements of the concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere have been suppressed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Chapter 1 of the IPCC Fourth Report (1), entitled “Historical overview of Climate Change Science” makes no mention of any early measurements.

Weart (2) in his “History of the Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect” also makes no mention of them.

Yet Beck (3) has provided an annotated list with links to internet access of almost 200 references to peer reviewed academic scientific journal articles containing some 40,000 measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide by chemical methods between 1800 and 1960. Comprehensive data sets in more than 390 papers were ignored despite contributions from prominent scientists like Robert Bunsen, Konrad Roentgen, and J S Haldane or the Nobel Prize winners August Krogh and Otto Warburg.

The earliest listed publication in 1800, and others from 1809-1816, are by Theodore de Saussure. He was the son of Horace-Benedict de Saussure, who invented the Hot Box (which resembled a greenhouse) which was the basis of the theory of the climate developed by Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier in 1822 and 1824 which is claimed to have originated the greenhouse effect. Yet the measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide by de Saussure’s son are completely ignored.

Other early references by Letts and Blake 1802 and 1719-15 from The Royal Dublin Society give an additional list of early measurements.

Beck (4-5) has published several summaries and commentaries on the early measurements and include an argument with Ralph Keeling (6).

Most of the early measurements were from Northern Europe. Beck considered that the earliest measurements were subject to various errors but the widespread use of more reliable equipment, particularly the Pettenkoffer titrimetric method in 1812 led to high accuracy, with a maximum 3% error reducing to 1% for the data of Henrik Lundegardh (1920–26).

The measurements selected by Beck were from rural areas or the periphery of towns, under comparable conditions of a height of approx. 2 m above ground at a site distant from potential industrial contamination. They showed a variation with time of day, of season, and of wind speed and direction, making it difficult to derive a local average, There were frequent measurements of concentrations higher than those reported as background concentrations by NOAA at present.

These measurements were carried out by real people with proper instruments in a large number of localities. They give a much better appreciation of variability and change in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over the period than the deductions from gas trapped in ice cores which are from unrepresentative locations and subject to much uncertainty (7).

In 1958 Charles Keeling, introduced a new technique for the accurate measurement of atmospheric CO2 using cryogenic condensation of air samples followed by NDIR spectroscopic analysis against a reference gas, using manometric calibration. Subsequently, this technique was adopted as an analytical standard for CO2 determination throughout the world, including by the World Meteorological Association.

The climate models sponsored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are based on the belief that the global climate has a “balanced“ energy which is only changed by increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. These gases are assumed to be well-mixed so that their concentration, all over the world, is a constant at any one particular time, increasing only with human emissions.

In order to support this theory Keeling at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography,“discovered” that there was an almost consistent “background” concentration of carbon dioxide which could be identified from suitable sites and shown to increase with carbon dioxide emissions, which could be considered to apply globally.

The procedure required to identify this background is described in some detail by Tans and Thoning (8) for the observatory at Mauna Loa.

Measurements whose standard deviation fell below a specified minimum were rejected. On average, over the entire record, there are 13.6 retained hours per day with background CO2. The rest were rejected as “noise”.

Beck (9) has discussed the Mauna Loa measurements. Comparison between old wet chemical and new physical methods in 1958 and 1967 on sea and land give a difference of about +10 ppm for the new procedure.

A similar procedure has been described for New Zealand (10).

At Baring Head maritime well mixed air masses come from the Southerly direction, and a baseline event is normally defined as one in which the local wind direction is from the South and the standard deviation of minute-by-minute CO2 concentrations is <<0 .1=”” 6=”” font=”” for=”” hours.=”” more=”” or=”” ppmv=””>

This “background” concentration is supposed to be well-mixed and to be unaffected by sources and sinks.

Yet the oceans are themselves contaminated with sources and sinks. (11)

The region around Mauna Loa includes areas with CO2 emissions, and much of the rest is a sink. It is understandable how difficult it is to get a sufficiently constant sample.

In order to claim that there is such a thing as a background CO2 it has been necessary to ensure that all measurements everywhere in the world are made from samples from over the oceans. Measurements over land surfaces have been comprehensively discouraged.

Yet the greenhouse effect is about emissions, namely “contamination” It is crazy, to take all this trouble to make measurements which do not involve the emitted gases themselves, but only a small fraction that is considered to be well-mixed, then to claim that it is these background figures which apply to the entire atmosphere.

This map shows that actual local concentrations of carbon dioxide are greatest over the
three large industrial areas. Since the supposed greenhouse effect is dependent on the logarithm of the carbon dioxide concentration, this means that above these areas the effect of increases is negligible or zero and the main supposed effects are on the areas with low current concentrations.

But this map does not tell the whole story.

Satellite measurements of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have recently improved with the Atmospheric Infra Red Sounder (AIRS) on NASA’s Aqua level 3 satellite, which is able to provide monthly figures for mid troposphere concentrations.

The AIRS NASA map14 for July 2009 which shows average CO2 concentration in the mid troposphere for July 2009 is in Figure 3.

This shows that for the mid troposphere regions the high emissions from the industrial countries are circulated, by the atmosphere, so that they are no longer above the regions of emission. Since this is a time as well as a column average the actual carbon dioxide concentration at any small region in the atmosphere is changing all the time and an overall figure above a particular place on the earth is continuously varying and currently unpredictable.

It also means that measurements taken just above the earth’s surface do not provide a fair guide to the influence of carbon dioxide at that place on the surface.

So carbon dioxide is not well-mixed in the atmosphere and the overall global models are no longer relevant.

NASA has even provided an animated video (14) based on a model of what they think happens. It shows that actual carbon dioxide concentrations vary with time and level everywhere in the atmosphere. The new OC-2 satellite promises to make individual time- and level-based measurements. (15) A global model is no longer relevant.

At least carbon dioxide can be shown to be beneficial. (16)

It is worth quoting the abstract of the paper by Randall et al 2013:

Satellite observations reveal a greening of the globe over recent decades. The role in this greening of the “CO2 fertilization” effect—the enhancement of photosynthesis due to rising CO2 levels—is yet to be established. The direct CO2 effect on vegetation should be most clearly expressed in warm, arid environments where water is the dominant limit to vegetation growth. Using gas exchange theory, we predict that the 14% increase in atmospheric CO2 (1982–2010) led to a 5 to 10% increase in green foliage cover in warm, arid environments. Satellite observations, analyzed to remove the effect of variations in precipitation, show that cover across these environments has increased by 11%. Our results confirm that the anticipated CO2 fertilization effect is occurring alongside ongoing anthropogenic perturbations to the carbon cycle and that the fertilization effect is now a significant land surface process.

REFERENCES:

1 .Le Treut, H., R. Somerville, U. Cubasch, Y. Ding, C. Mauritzen, A. Mokssit, T. Peterson and M. Prather, 2007: Historical Overview of Climate Change. In:Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Solomon, S., D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis, K.B. Averyt, M. Tignor and H.L. Miller (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.

2 Weart S 2011, The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect.http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm#S1.http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

3. Beck, E-G, CO2 1800-1960 Historical References, Chemical Methodshttp://www.biomind.de/realCO2/literature/CO2literature1800-1960.pdf

4 Beck, E-G, 2007.180 Years of Atmospheric Gas Analysis by Chemical Methods, Energy and Environment 18 259-281.

5 Beck E-G Evidence of variability of atmospheric CO2 concentration during the 20th century http://www.biomind.de/realCO2/literature/evidence-var-corrRSCb.pdf

6 Keeling R. Comment + reply from author on “180 Years of atmospheric CO2gas analysis by chemical methods by”by Ernst-Georg Beck,Energy and Environment, Vol. 18(2), 259-282, 2007.

7 Jaworowski, Z. 2007. CO2: The Greatest Scientific Swindle of Our Time. EIR Science (March), 38-55.

8 Pieter Tans and Kirk Thoning. How we measure background CO2 at Mauna Loa http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.pdf9 Beck E-G 50 Years of Continuous Measurement of CO2 on Mauna Loa. Energy and Environment 19 No. 7 2008.

10 Manning M R, A.J. Gomez, and K.P. Pohl Trendshttp://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/baring.html.

11 Takahashi T et al., 1999 Deep-Sea Research II 49 (2002) 1601–1622 Global sea–air CO2 flux based on climatological surface ocean pCO2, and seasonal biological and temperature effectshttp://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~csweeney/papers/taka2002.pdf

http://www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/global/acid2.htm

12 EDGAR Emission Database for Global Atmospheric Researchhttp://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/part_CO2.php .

13 Climate Change Indicators http://scentofpine.org/indicators/

14 NASA | A Year in the Life of Earth’s CO2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1SgmFa0r04

15 Orbiting Carbon Observatory OCO-2 http://oco.jpl.nasa.gov/

16 Randall J. Donohue, Michael L. Roderick, Tim R. McVicar, Graham D. Farquhar. Impact of CO2 fertilization on maximum foliage cover across the globe’s warm, arid environments. Geophysical Research Letters, 2013; DOI:10.1002/grl.50563

Wynne Government is Destroying Ontario, Tells Us, It Is “Good” for Us!

December 1, 2014December 1, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

How green energy subsidies work: the government makes stuff up, then wastes billions of dollars while the economy bleeds jobs

Two items in the Toronto Sun caught my eye earlier this month, both written by Lorrie Goldstein about what the paper calls “the Wynne Liberals’ mad obsession with expensive and unneeded green energy.” The first column is about a recent report published by Parker Gallant and Scott Luft of Wind Concerns Ontario, agrassroots organization that opposes wind turbines.

According to Wind Concerns Ontario, last month the provincial government spent over $1 billionmore for electricity than its market value. The organization blames the government’s “rush to incorporate ‘renewable’ energy in the form of wind, solar, biomass, etc. into the grid, without a cost-benefit analysis” as the reason for rapidly increasing energy prices in Ontario. And as Lorrie noted in his column the following week, whenever the “Liberals are called on the carpet over skyrocketing electricity prices in Ontario, they go into their patented, ‘but we eliminated coal’ routine. Meaning they eliminated coal-fired electricity and replaced it with ‘clean’ energy sources such as solar and wind power.”

This makes no sense, according to Goldstein, who points out that coal-fired electricity generating stations supplied 25% of Ontario’s power needs in 2007 but wind and solar provide only 4% today.

Furthermore, according to the Fraser Institute, the 4% solar and wind provides accounts “for about 20 percent of the average commodity cost,” even though the Ontario Energy Board said last year that solar and wind would provide 7% of Ontario’s power and “their direct costs would account for about the same fraction of the average commodity cost.”

This wouldn’t be the first time that the government’s estimates were wildly off. Dalton McGuinty promised in 2009 that the Green Energy Act would create 50,000 jobs by the end of 2012, but as Lorrie Goldstein wrote in the Sun last year, as of mid-2013 only 31,000 jobs had materialized. Most of them were temporary (lasting only one to three years) and were “indirect” jobs, so even the claim that 31,000 jobs were created is difficult to verify.

To make matters worse, the figure of 31,000 did not take into account the jobs that would be permanently lost as a result of increased electricity prices. A Fraser Institute report published last year found that the Green Energy Act “will not create jobs or improve economic growth in Ontario.” Lorrie Goldstein wrote that the 31,000 new jobs cost the economy 62,000 to 124,000 jobs in other sectors, as a result of high energy prices.

Such dismal results for government investments in green energy are not unique to Ontario, of course.

Consider, for example, this paper published in 2009 by researchers from the King Juan Carlos University in Spain. The researchers found that for every “green job” created by the government, 2.2 jobs were lost elsewhere in the economy (note that this number falls into the range of Lorrie’s estimate).

The researchers also found that every green energy job created by Spain since 2000 cost the government, on average, 571,138 Euros. The final cost of the Spanish experience with renewable energy subsidies is massive. Between subsidies and higher electricity prices, tens of billions of Euros were lost. The researchers also found that these enormous costs “do not appear to be unique to Spain’s approach but instead are largely inherent in schemes to promote renewable energy sources.”

It is unclear to me, therefore, what the Ontario Government expects its residents to gain in return for all the time and money poured into green energy projects. Ontarians are paying outrageous electricity prices, jobs have been lost, and billions of dollars have been wasted – and all we have appeared to gain is a few kind words from ‘Saint’ David Suzuki, which is of no value to anyone.

There is No Reason for Them To Lie! Google Engineers Expose the Renewables Scam!

December 1, 2014 / 1957chev / 1 Comment

Google’s Top Engineers say: “Renewable Energy Simply Won’t Work”

December 1, 2014 by stopthesethings

Renewable energy ‘simply WON’T WORK’: Top Google engineers
The Register
Lewis Page
21 November 2014

Windmills, solar, tidal – all a ‘false hope’, say Stanford PhDs

Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that renewables will never permit the human race to cut CO₂emissions to the levels demanded by climate activists. Whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.

Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren’t guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or “technology” of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company. The duo were employed at Google on the RE<C project, which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal.

RE<C was a failure, and Google closed it down after four years. Now, Koningstein and Fork have explained the conclusions they came to after a lengthy period of applying their considerable technological expertise to renewables, in an article posted at IEEE Spectrum.

The two men write:

At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …

Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

One should note that RE<C didn’t restrict itself to conventional renewable ideas like solar PV, windfarms, tidal, hydro etc. It also looked extensively into more radical notions such as solar-thermal, geothermal, “self-assembling” wind towers and so on and so forth. There’s no get-out clause for renewables believers here.

Koningstein and Fork aren’t alone. Whenever somebody with a decent grasp of maths and physics looks into the idea of a fully renewables-powered civilised future for the human race with a reasonably open mind, they normally come to the conclusion that it simply isn’t feasible. Merely generating the relatively small proportion of our energy that we consume today in the form of electricity is already an insuperably difficult task for renewables: generating huge amounts more on top to carry out the tasks we do today using fossil-fuelled heat isn’t even vaguely plausible.

Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.

In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably). This in turn means that everyone would become miserably poor and economic growth would cease (the more honest hardline greens admit this openly). That, however, means that such expensive luxuries as welfare states and pensioners, proper healthcare (watch out for that pandemic), reasonable public services, affordable manufactured goods and transport, decent personal hygiene, space programmes (watch out for the meteor!) etc etc would all have to go – none of those things are sustainable without economic growth.

So nobody’s up for that. And yet, stalwart environmentalists like Koningstein and Fork – and many others – remain convinced that the dangers of carbon-driven warming are real and massive. Indeed the pair reference the famous NASA boffin Dr James Hansen, who is more or less the daddy of modern global warming fears, and say like him that we must move rapidly not just to lessened but to zero carbon emissions (and on top of that, suck a whole lot of CO₂ out of the air by such means as planting forests).

So, how is this to be done?

Koningstein and Fork say that humanity’s only hope is a new method of energy generation which can provide power – ideally “dispatchable” (can be turned on and off) and/or “distributed” (produced near where it’s wanted) – at costs well below those of coal or gas. They write:

What’s needed are zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over within the next 40 years …

Incremental improvements to existing technologies aren’t enough; we need something truly disruptive.

Unfortunately the two men don’t know what that is, or if they do they aren’t saying. James Hansen does, though: it’s nuclear power.

As applied at the moment, of course, nuclear power isn’t cheap enough to provide a strong economic rationale. That’s because its costs have been forced enormously higher than they would otherwise be by the imposition of cripplingly high health and safety standards (in its three “disasters” so far – Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima – the scientifically verified death tolls from all causes have been and will be zero, 56 and zero: a record which other power industries including renewables can only envy*).

Nuclear costs have also been artificially driven up by the non-issue of “waste”. In the UK for instance, all “higher activity nuclear waste” must be kept expensively stored in a secure specialist facility and can only ever – perhaps – be finally disposed of in a wildly expensive geological vault. No less than 99.7 per cent of this “waste” is actually intermediate-level, meaning that it basically isn’t radioactive at all: you could theoretically make half a tonne of ordinary dirt into such “intermediate level nuclear waste” by burying a completely legal luminous wristwatch in it. (If you did that inside the boundaries of a licensed nuclear facility, the dirt really would then become ridiculously costly “waste”.)

The remaining 0.003 of “nuclear waste” actually is dangerous, but it can almost all be reprocessed into fuel and used again. So waste really doesn’t need to be an issue at all.

There can’t be any doubt that if nuclear power had been allowed to be as dangerous per unit of energy generated as, say, the gas industry* – let alone the terribly dangerous coal business – it truly would be too cheap to meter and Messrs Koningstein and Fork’s problem would have been solved for them decades ago: by now, nobody with access to uranium would be bothering with fossil fuels except for specialist purposes – and there’s no reason why nations “of concern” couldn’t be kept safely supplied. Would we run out of uranium? Not until the year 5000AD.

Cheap power solves a lot more problems than just carbon emissions, too. If power is cheap, so is fresh water (the fact is we’re really at that point already, though a lot of people refuse to admit it and prefer to treat fresh water as some sort of scarce and finite resource). If fresh water is cheap, an awful lot more of the planet is habitable and/or arable than is the case if it’s expensive: and that is truly game-changing stuff for the human race.

And as a side benefit we’d by now have actual useful spacecraft which could actually go to places in reasonable amounts of time carrying reasonable amounts of stuff at reasonable costs. We’d be able to establish viable bases on other planets – for instance to mine uranium there, should we ever find ourselves running low.

Even if you aren’t terribly convinced about the looming menace of carbon-driven warming, the fact that we have decided of our own free will not to have cheap, abundant energy and all the miracles it would bring with it … that’s a terrible human tragedy. Nobody knows how much misery might result from climate change in the future, but one can say with certainty that a lot of misery has been caused by the absence of cheap energy, water, food and decent places to live over the last sixty-plus years.

Anyway the truth is that the disruptive new technology which Koningstein and Fork are dreaming of already exists: but it’s been stolen from us by our foolish fears, inflated in many cases by dishonest activists. Even if someone could come up with some other way of making terrifically cheap energy, there’s no guarantee that the ignorant fearmongers of the world wouldn’t manage to suppress that too. There would almost certainly be a powerful application in weapons, just as there is in nuclear; this is, after all, energy we’re talking about.

Koningstein and Fork believe that the answer to the carbon menace is a reallocation of R&D spending, to seek out high-risk disruptive technologies. But the fact is it would probably make more sense to spend money on making sure that people don’t reach voting age without understanding basic mathematics and facts about risk and energy.

You wouldn’t need to take that money from R&D. You could instead repurpose some of the huge and growing amounts of money that are currently being diverted into the purchase of tiny amounts of ridiculously expensive renewable energy.

After all, no matter the wider issues, we now have it on the best and unimpeachably environmentalist of authorities that renewable energy can’t achieve its stated purpose. So – no matter what – there can’t be any point in continuing with it.

None of this is new, of course. These realities have been wilfully ignored by the British governing class and others for many years. But the British/American governing classes, so fatally committed to renewables, often seem willing to listen to Google even if they won’t listen to anyone else.

So, just maybe, this time the message will have some impact.

Bootnote

*The Piper Alpha gas rig explosion of 1988 on its own caused three times as many deaths as the nuclear power industry has in its entire history. Bizarrely though, no nations ceased using gas.
The Register

James Delingpole followed up on The Register’s brilliant piece of analysis with his usual dash and flair.

Renewable Energy: So Useless That Even Greenie Google Gave up on it
Breitbart.com
James Delingpole
22 November 2014

Some people call it “renewable energy” but I prefer to call it “alternative energy” because that’s what it really is: an alternative to energy that actually works (eg nuclear and anything made from wonderful, energy-rich fossil fuel.)

Now a pair of top boffins from uber-green Google’s research department have reached the same conclusion.

Ross Konigstein and David Fork, both Stanford PhDs (aerospace engineering; applied physics) were employed on a Google research project which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal. But after four years, the project was closed down. In this post at IEEE Spectrum they tell us why.

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

Why is renewable energy such a total fail? Because, as Lewis Page explains here, it’s so ludicrously inefficient and impossibly expensive that if ever we were so foolish as to try rolling it out on a scale beyond its current boutique levels, it would necessitate bankrupting the global economy.

In a nutshell, renewable energy is rubbish because so much equipment is needed to make it work – steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage – that it very likely uses up more energy than it actually produces.

Yet our political class remains committed to the fantasy that the emperor’s green clothes are perfectly magnificent. Earlier this week, for example, the British government chucked £720 million of taxpayers’ money into a cesspit labelled the Green Climate Fund.

In theory this UN-driven initiative is supposed to help Third World countries cope with the effects of climate change. In reality, all it will do is force on their struggling economies more of the costly, intermittent renewable technologies (wind turbines; solar; etc) which have proved such a disaster for the advanced Western economies.

If we really want to throw money at the developing world so it can combat climate change, then what we should really be doing is insist that it is spent on adaptation projects – not, heaven forfend, ones to do with “decarbonisation.”

As Benny Peiser and Daniel Mahoney write here, adaptation projects make a real difference and save lives.

Bangladesh’s investment in cyclone shelters, better weather forecasts, and smarter construction practices is a prime example of how effective adaptation can be. The country has learnt how to prepare for the threat of cyclones, succeeding in significantly reducing related deaths. The two deadliest cyclones in Bangladesh’s history occurred in 1970 and 1991, killing up to 500,000 and almost 140,000 respectively. Through adaptation investment, in the last two decades the country has been able to reduce deaths and injuries from such disasters 100-fold.

Instead, though, our leaders are still ideologically committed to wasting much of our foreign aid on renewables.

Take the UK’s recent contributions. Just over a quarter of UK climate aid from 2011 to the beginning of 2014 went to adaptation measures, whereas well over 50 per cent was allocated to renewables, according to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact. The World Resources Institute estimates that, between 2010 and 2012, of a total of $35bn in global climate aid, a mere $5bn was allocated to adaptation.

You know that scene right at the end of Spartacus? Well I think I’d like to recreate it, using wind turbines instead of crucifixes, and, instead of rebellious gladiators, all those lovely people – green activists, wind and solar industry parasites, idiot politicians – who’ve been telling us that renewable energy is the way forward.
Breitbart.com

Big wind Pressing Congress, For More Money! $$$$$$$$ It’s a money-pit!

November 30, 2014November 30, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Via. Greenie Watch 30 November 2014

Big Wind is pressing Congress for yet another bailout

By Mary Kay Barton

Taxpayers beware! While you were sleeping, enjoying your family and eating turkey,

Congress has been busy.

Congressional Republicans are negotiating with Senate Democrats to extend the infamous wind energy Production Tax Credit through to

2017, after which it will supposedly be phased out, just as was supposed to happen in the past. This sneaky, dark-of-night “lame duck”

session tactic should be flatly rejected.

While you’ve been busy just trying to make ends meet, wondering why the cost of everything is going up, and agonizing over how your

children and grandchildren will ever pay the mounting $18 TRILLION dollar national debt – the wind industry lobbyists’ group, the

American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), just sent Congress a letter seeking to extend the federal, taxpayer-funded wind Production Tax

Credit (PTC).

The list of signers to AWEA’s letter include rent-seeking industries and “green” groups who’ve all benefitted by tapping into

taxpayers’ wallets via the Big Wind PTC (aka: Pork-To-Cronies). It certainly isn’t hard to figure out why these corporations pay many

millions of dollars to hire lobbyists and run national TV advertising campaigns geared at convincing crony-politicians to vote to

continue these TAXES and higher energy prices on American citizens.

AWEA’a letter is typical of wind industry propaganda. It makes specious claims about creating jobs and reducing pollution, without

providing a shred of evidence to PROVE any of their claims. AWEA apparently hopes Congressional officials are “too stupid” to

understand what energy-literate citizens nationwide know: Industrial wind can NEVER provide reliable power. It raises electricity

costs, even after subsidies are factored in. It kills more jobs than it creates. It defiles wildlife habitats and kills eagles, hawks,

other birds and bats – with no penalties to Big Wind operators.

Here’s the reality: After 22+ years of picking U.S. taxpayers’ and ratepayers’ pockets, industrial wind has NOT significantly reduced

carbon dioxide emissions. It has not replaced any conventional power plants, anywhere. However, the $Trillions spent on these “green”

boondoggles to date have significantly added to the $18+ TRILLION dollar debt that our children and grandchildren will have to bear.

AWEA’s own statements from years and decades past can be used against them. To cite just one example, 31 years ago, a study coauthored

by the AWEA stated:

The private sector can be expected to develop improved solar and wind technologies which will begin to become competitive and self-

supporting on a national level by the end of the decade if assisted by tax credits and augmented by federally sponsored R&D.

[American Wind Energy Association, et al. Quoted in Renewable Energy Industry, Joint Hearing before the Subcommittees of the Committee

on Energy and Commerce et al., House of Representatives, 98th Cong., 1st sess. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983, p.

52.]

In other words, the PTC should have ended 20 years ago, because wind energy would be self-sustaining by then. It wasn’t. It still

isn’t. It never will be. We need to pull the PTC plug now!

Here are some details about the bill that is currently being negotiated during the lame duck session –before the newly elected,

Republican majority Senate takes office and can do much about it.

In 2016, wind developers would be eligible for 80% percent of the PTC’s value. They could also claim 60% of its value through the first

nine months of 2017, after which it would supposedly expire.

The proposed congressional deal also seems to continue basing PTC eligibility on when project construction project begins. That opens

huge doors for abuse.

The last time Congress extended the PTC, as part of its “fiscal cliff” deal in 2013, it said “eligibility” for taxpayer largesse

covered projects “under construction,” rather than requiring that they be “placed in service” by a certain date. In practice, this

means just a shovelful of dirt has to be moved by that date.

Remember too that the Production Tax Credit supposedly expired last year. But this clever language has allowed construction and

expansion in the meantime. Meanwhile, Lois Lerner’s Internal Revenue Service has helpfully said projects that were started or “safe-

harbored” prior to the PTC’s most recent pseudo-expiration can claim tax credits if they are in service by 2015. And then they can

claim the $23-per-MWh credit for ten more years!

What a wonderful holiday gift for Big Wind and its political sponsors – at your expense.

Our government should NOT be in the business of picking and choosing the winners and losers in the energy marketplace – while

assaulting and harming the very citizens they are forcing to pay for this “green” energy scam. It’s time for government to get out of

the way and let the markets work!

The best solutions will rise to the top of their own accord because they will provide modern power at the best prices – thereby

maintaining the reliable, affordable power that has made America great.

Citizens nation-wide have awakened to this massive “green” energy scam. Many have sent letters to Congress like the one below. You can

join the fight by contacting your representatives and urging them to do the right thing: Protect American consumers, taxpayers and

ratepayers. END Wind Welfare (#EndWindWelfare)!

Ontario’s Liberal Government Ignores, and Denies, Health Effects of Wind Turbines…

November 30, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Ontario’s Wind Powered Health Calamity

November 30, 2014 by stopthesethings

Ontario is the scene of a perfectly avoidable and entirely unnecessarypublic health disaster.

The rights of people to live peaceful, healthy lives in rural Ontario have been trampled under the jackboots of Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals – a solid team of hard-‘green’-left eco-fascist nutjobs, responsible for the most bizarre, pointless and costly energy policy on Earth (see our posts hereand here and here)

The scale and scope of the disaster was laid bare in the brilliant documentary, Down Wind (see our post here) and has been pursued with proper journalistic zeal by Sun News’ investigative reporter, Rebecca Thompson (see our posts here and here).

A couple of weeks back, Wynne’s puppets at her Health Department (laughably called “Health Canada”) threw together yet another half-baked, wind industry approved pile of tosh parading as “research” on the known and obvious impacts of turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound.

Ever since, properly qualified people have been slamming it for the sloppiness of the work and the wild assumptions upon which its undercooked “conclusions” rest.

Two of them – Carmen Krogh and Bob McMurtry penned the piece below.

Carmen Krogh, BScPharm (retired), is a peer reviewed IWT health researcher and former Director of Publications and Editor-in-Chief of the CPS.

RY “Bob” McMurtry is Professor Emeritus (Surgery) of Western University (formerly University of Western Ontario). Dr. McMurtry was also an ADM at Health Canada 2000-02.

Health Canada and Wind Turbines: Too little too late?
CMAJ
28 November 2014

Industrial wind turbines (IWTs) are being erected at rapid pace around the world. Coinciding with the introduction of IWTs, some individuals living in proximity to IWTs report adverse health effects including annoyance, sleep disturbance, stress-related health impacts and reduced quality of life. [i],[ii],[iii],[iv],[v],[vi],[vii],[viii],[ix],[x],[xi],[xii] In some cases Canadian families reporting adverse health effects have abandoned their homes, been billeted away from their homes or hired legal counsel to successfully reach a financial agreement with the wind energy developer.[xiii]

To help address public concern over these health effects Health Canada (HC) announced the Health Canada Wind Turbine Noise and Health Study(HC Study) 2 years ago and brought forth preliminary results November 6, 2014.

Here we briefly comment on the HC Study results and provide some historical context.

Acknowledgement of IWT adverse health effects is not new. The term “annoyance” frequently appears when discussing IWT health effects.

In a 2009 letter the Honourable Rona Ambrose, disclosed:

“Health Canada provides advice on the health effect of noise and low-frequency electric and magnetic fields from proposed wind turbine projects…To date, their examination of the scientific literature on wind turbine noise is that the only health effect conclusively demonstrated from exposure to wind turbine noise is an increase of self-reported general annoyance and complaints (i.e., headaches, nausea, tinnitus, vertigo).” [xiv]

In 2009, the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) sponsored a literature review which acknowledges the reported symptoms such as headaches, nausea, tinnitus, vertigo and state they “… are not new and have been published previously in the context of “annoyance”…” and are the “… well-known stress effects of exposure to noise …”[xv]

In 2011, a health survey of people exposed to IWTs in Ontario reported altered quality of life, sleep disturbance, excessive tiredness, headaches, stress and distress. [xvi]

In the same year, CanWEA posted a media release which advised those impacted by wind turbine annoyance stating “The association has always acknowledged that a small percentage of people can be annoyed by wind turbines in their vicinity. … When annoyance has a significant impact on an individual’s quality of life, it is important that they consult their doctor.”[xvii]

It turns out it’s not a small percentage of people annoyed by wind turbines. An Ontario Government report concluded a non-trivial percentage of persons are expected to be highly annoyed.

The December 2011 report prepared by a member of CanWEA for the Ontario Ministry of Environment states in the conclusions:

“The audible sound from wind turbines, at the levels experienced at typical receptor distances in Ontario, is nonetheless expected to result in a non-trivial percentage of persons being highly annoyed. As with sounds from many sources, research has shown that annoyance associated with sound from wind turbines can be expected to contribute to stress related health impacts in some persons.”[xviii]

The World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledges noise induced annoyance to be a health effect [xix] and the results of WHO research “…confirmed, on an epidemiological level, an increased health risk from chronic noise annoyance…”[xx]

HC also acknowledges noise induced annoyance to be an adverse health effect. [xxi],[xxii] The Principal Investigator of the recent HC Study also states “noise-induced annoyance is an adverse health effect”. [xxiii]

Canadian Government sponsored research has found statistically significant relationships from IWT noise exposure.

A 2014 review article in the Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine reports:

“In 2013, research funded by the Ontario Ministry of the Environment indicated a statistically significant relation between residents’ distance from the turbine and the symptoms of disturbed sleep, vertigo and tinnitus, and recommended that future research focus on the effects of wind turbine noise on sleep disturbance and symptoms of inner ear problems.” [xxiv]

Recently on November 6, 2014, HC posted on its website preliminary results of its HC Study[xxv]. Wind turbine noise “…. annoyance was found to be statistically related to several self-reporting health effects including, but not limited to, blood pressure, migraines, tinnitus, dizziness, scores on the PSQI, and perceived stress” as well as related to “measured hair cortisol, systolic and diastolic blood pressure.”

These troubling results come as no surprise. Since at least 2007 HC employees including the Principal Investigator of the HC Study recommended wind turbine noise criteria which they predict will result in adverse health effects. (i.e. result in an increase percentage highly annoyed).[xxvi],[xxvii],[xxviii]

Then turbines were built and HC spent 2.1 million dollars to find out it appears to have under predicted the impact of IWT noise. HC’s IWT noise criteria does not use a dose response based on IWT noise but rather road noise. But of course IWTs are not cars and peer-reviewed studies consistently document that IWTs produce sound that is perceived to be more annoying than transportation or industrial noise at comparable sound pressure levels. [xxix],[xxx]

IWT noise annoyance starts at dBA sound pressure levels in the low 30s and rises sharply at 35 dBA as compared to road noise which starts at 55 dBA. These findings are further supported by the HC Study’s preliminary results. [xxxi]

IWT noise characteristics that are identified as plausible causes for reported health effects include amplitude modulation, audible low- frequency noise (LFN), infrasound, tonal noise, impulse noise and night-time noise. [xxxii]

The logical solution would be to develop IWT noise criteria which will protect human health but that would present a barrier to wind energy development. Noise limits impacts IWT siting, cost of energy produced[xxxiii] and by extension corporate profits. The wind energy industry has actively lobbied governments to be granted IWT noise exposure limits which benefit their industry.

Canadians trying to understand this should be mindful the Government of Canada has invested and distributed significant amounts of public money to attract and support the wind energy industry. [xxxiv],[xxxv],[xxxvi],[xxxvii],[xxxviii],[xxxix],[xl],[xli] In addition to providing funding, the Government of Canada in collaboration with wind industry stakeholders has developed the Wind Technology Road Map (Wind TRM) [xlii] which Natural Resources Canada defined to be an “…industry-led, government supported initiative that has developed a long-term vision for the Canadian wind energy industry …”.[xliii]

Canada’s Wind TRM states “Members of the Steering Committee, government and our industry will be using this roadmap to direct the actions that are necessary for Canada to develop its vast wind resources.”[xliv] HC is a member of the Interdepartmental Wind Technology Road Map Committee [xlv] which was created to assist in the implementation of Canada’s Wind TRM. [xlvi] One of the “key action items” detailed in the Wind TRM calls for Government and Industry collaboration to develop and maintain government documents that address concerns raised about wind energy projects including that of noise, infrasound and other. [xlvii]

Some jurisdictions are trying to take action to protect their residents. For example, several municipalities in Ontario are trying to establish bylaws that protect from IWT noise. In Wisconsin, on October 14, 2014 the Brown County Board of Health unanimously approved a motion to declare the IWTs at a local project a Human Health Hazard. [xlviii]

It would appear HC’s research effort is too little too late. A non-trivial percentage of Canadians continue to experience adverse health effects. HC now has additional scientific evidence of the “conclusively demonstrated” effects from exposure to IWT noise. It is time for HC to take action to help Canadians maintain and improve their health. (for the references, see below)
CMAJ

Bob and Carmen aren’t the only qualified experts dumping on the woeful “methods” and flawed assumptions of the Health Canada “research”.

John Harrison, a Queen’s University professor emeritus in physics, slammed the “research”, saying that: “the Health Canada study is more politics than science“.

John Harrison is joined by Denise Wolfe – a highly experienced clinical trial research auditor – who has taken a well-honed axe to the “study” – hammering it for:

hiding and fudging the raw data;
failing to meet the study design’s own sample size criteria;
only taking its noise samples during summer, when there is little or no wind;
inherent inconsistencies between the data relied on and the arguments presented in the report;
incomplete and inconsistent noise modelling;
excluding children – the most vulnerable group – from the study altogether;
failing to point out that annoyance of the kind identified by the study (which includes sleep deprivation) is defined by the WHO as an adverse health effect (refer to its Night-time Noise Guidelines for Europe – the Executive Summary at XI to XII covers the point);
failing to even bother analysing the infrasound data gathered;
and, having failed to even analyse the infrasound data, making wholly unsupported conclusions about its impact on sleep and health;
in relation to its flawed noise data modelling, relying on wind speed data up to 50km away from the residences involved;
making the bogus claim that the study has been published in a peer-reviewed journal (it hasn’t);
misleading verbiage (ie waffle and gobbledygook);
prematurely publishing what is a piece of political propaganda, based on incomplete and deliberately misleading and inconsistent information; and
failing to disclose links between those that worked on the study and their wind industry backers.

References (to the CMAJ article)

[i] Pedersen E, Persson KW. Perception and annoyance due to wind turbine noise–a dose response relationship. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 2004; 116: 3460-70.

[ii] Harry A. Wind turbines, noise and health. 2007, February. Availablehere

[iii] Pedersen E, Persson Waye K. Wind turbine noise, annoyance and self-reported health and well being in different living environments. Occupational and Environmental Medicine. 2007;64:480-86.

[iv] Phipps R, Amati M, McCoard S, Fisher R. Visual and noise effects reported by residents living close to Manawatu wind farms: Preliminary survey results. 2007. Available here

[v] Pedersen E, Bakker R, Bouma J, van den Berg F. Response to noise from modern wind farms in the Netherlands. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2009; 126: 634-43.

[vi] Pierpont N. Wind turbine syndrome: A report on a natural experiment. Santa Fe, NM: K-Selected Books. 2009. Available here

[vii] Krogh C, Gillis L, Kouwen N, Aramini J. WindVOiCe, a self-reporting survey: Adverse health effects, industrial wind turbines, and the need for vigilance monitoring. Bulletin of Science Technology & Society. 2011; 31: 334-45.

[viii] Shepherd D, McBride D, Welch D, Dirks KN, Hill EM. Evaluating the impact of wind turbine noise on health-related quality of life. Noise Health. 2011;13:333-9.

[ix] Thorne B. The problems with noise numbers for wind farm noise assessment. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. 2011;31:262-90.

[x] Rand R., Ambrose S, Krogh C. Wind turbine acoustic investigation: infrasound and low-frequency noise–a case study, Bulletin of Science Technology & Society. 2012;32:128–41

[xi] Falmouth Health Department. Letter to Massachusetts Department of Public Health. June 11, 2012. Available on request.

[xii] Nissenbaum M, Aramini J, Hanning C. Effects of industrial wind turbine noise on sleep and health. Noise Health. 2012;14:60:237-43.

[xiii] Roy D. Jeffery, Carmen Krogh, and Brett Horner Industrial wind turbines and adverse health effects

[xiv] Can J Rural Med 2014;19(1):21-26

[xiv] Krogh – Correspondence from the Honourable Rona Ambrose, June 30, 2009. Available on request.

[xv] Colby, W. D., Dobie, R., Leventhall, G., Lipscomb, D. M., McCunney, R. J., Seilo, M. T., & Søndergaard, B., Wind Turbine Sound and Health Effects: An Expert Panel Review, Washington, DC: American Wind Energy Association and Canadian Wind Energy Association. (2009). Available here

[xvi] Krogh C, Gillis L, Kouwen N, Aramini J. WindVOiCe, a self-reporting survey: Adverse health effects, industrial wind turbines, and the need for vigilance monitoring. Bulletin of Science Technology & Society. 2011; 31: 334-45.

[xvii] The Canadian Wind Energy Association, The Canadian Wind Energy Association Responds To October 14, 2011 Statement By Wind Concerns Ontario, Media Release (2011, October 14) PDF Available on request.

[xviii] Howe Gastmeier Chapnik Limited. (2010, December 10). Low frequency noise and infrasound associated with wind turbine generator systems: A literature review (Rfp No. Oss-078696). Mississauga, Ontario, Canada: Ministry of the Environment.

[xix] World Health Organization, Guidelines for Community Noise,1999 Available here

[xx] Niemann H, Bonnefoy X, Braubach M, Hecht K, Maschke C, Rodrigues C, Robbel N. Noise-induced annoyance and morbidity results from the pan-European LARES study. Noise Health 2006;8:63-79

[xxi] Health Canada, Community Noise Annoyance, It’s Your Health, (2005, September). [cited 2014 Nov 25]. Available here

[xxii] Health Canada, Useful Information for Environmental Assessments, (2010), Published by authority of the Minister of Health. [cited 2014 Nov 25]]. Available here

[xxiii] Michaud, D. S., Keith, S. E., & McMurchy, D., “Noise Annoyance in Canada”, Noise Health, 7, 39-47, (2005)

[xxiv] Roy D. Jeffery, Carmen Krogh, and Brett Horner Industrial wind turbines and adverse health effects

[xiv] Can J Rural Med 2014;19(1) Available here

[xxv] Health Canada, Wind Turbine Noise and Health Study: Summary of Results, November 6 2014. Available here

[xxvi] Keith SE, Michaud DS, Bly SHP. A justification for using a 45 dBA sound level criterion for wind turbine projects. N.D.

[xxvii] Keith SE, Michaud DS, Bly SHP. A proposal for evaluating the potential health effects of wind turbine noise for projects under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. Second International Meeting on Wind Turbine Noise, Lyon France September 20 -21 2007

[xxviii] Keith SE, Michaud DS, Bly SHP. A proposal for evaluating the potential health effects of wind turbine noise for projects under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. J Low Freq Noise. 2008:27:253-65.

[xxix] Pedersen E, Persson KW. Perception and annoyance due to wind turbine noise–a dose response relationship. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 2004; 116: 3460-70.

[xxx] Pedersen E, Bakker R, Bouma J, van den Berg F. Response to noise from modern wind farms in the Netherlands. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2009; 126: 634-43.

[xxxi] Health Canada, Wind Turbine Noise and Health Study: Summary of Results, November 6 2014. Available here

[xxxii] Jeffery RD, Krogh CME, and Horner B, [Review] Industrial wind turbines and adverse health effects Can J Rural Med 2014;19(1), 21-26. Available here

[xxxiii] Canadian Wind Energy Association [website]. Letter to Neil Parish re: sound level limits for wind farms. Ottawa, ON: Canadian Wind Energy Association; 2004. Available on request.

[xxxiv] Government of Canada, Natural Resources Canada, EcoEnergy for Renewable Power, web update June 1 2009 Improving Energy Performance in Canada an ecoACTION initiative. Available here

[xxxv] Government of Canada Natural Resources Canada: Government of Canada Announces $9.2 Million for Alberta Wind Energy Project. July 07, Available here

[xxxvi] Minister of Natural Resources Lisa Raitt (Thursday, 10 Sept 2009) MEDIA RELEASE -Renewable Energy Expands in Ontario. Available here

[xxxvii] Government of Canada, Natural Resources Canada. ecoENERGY for Renewable Power Program Power Program Date Modified: 2011-02-25 Available here

[xxxviii] Government of Canada, Natural Resources Canada. About Renewable Energy

[xxxix] Government of Canada, Natural Resources Canada. ecoENERGY for Renewable Power Program, Available here

[xl] Government of Canada, Natural Resources Canada. ecoENERGY for Renewable Power Program Power Program. Available here

[xli] The Honourable Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources Canada, Letter of correspondence August 10, 2012. Available on request.

[xlii] Access to Information and Privacy Request (ATIP) Briefing Note to the Ministers Office, Update on the Development of Federal-Provincial-Territorial Guidelines on Wind Turbine Noise

[xliii] Government of Canada, Natural Resources Canada (NRCAN) Wind Energy | Canada’s Wind TRM (Technology Road Map). Available here

[xliv] Government of Canada, Natural Resources Canada (NRCAN) Wind Energy | Canada’s Wind TRM (Technology Road Map). Available here

[xlv] Health Canada, (2012) Health Canada Policy and Research Approach for Wind Turbine Noise – A presentation to the Science Advisory Board, February 2, 2012 Available here

[xlvi] Government of Canada, Natural Resources Canada. Wind Technology Road Map. Next Steps. Available here

[xlvii] Government of Canada, Natural Resources Canada (NRCAN) Wind Energy | Canada’s Wind TRM (Technology Road Map). Available here

[xlviii] Proceedings of the Brown County Board of Health, Meeting, Tuesday, October 14, 2014 Available here (see page 13)
CMAJ

Why Do Global Warming Alarmists Want to Scare us, and Why Are They Lying To Us?

November 23, 2014 / 1957chev / 2 Comments

People Starting To Ask About Motive For Massive IPCC Deception

Guest Blogger / 2 hours ago November 23, 2014

Guest Opinion: Dr.Tim Ball

Skeptics have done a reasonable JOB of explaining what and how the IPCC created bad climate science. Now, as more people understand what the skeptics are saying, the question that most skeptics have not, or do not want to address is being asked – why? What is the motive behind corrupting science to such an extent? Some skeptics seem to believe it is just poor quality scientists, who don’t understand physics, but that doesn’t explain the amount, and obviously deliberate NATURE, of what has been presented to the public. What motive would you give, when asked?

The first step in understanding, is knowledge about how easily large-scale deceptions are achieved. Here is an explanation from one of the best proponents in HISTORY.

“All this was inspired by the principle – which is quite true in itself – that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to FABRICATE colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying. These people know only too well how to use falsehood for the basest purposes.”

————————–

Do these remarks explain the comments of Jonathan Gruber about legislation for the AFFORDABLE CARE ACT, aka Obamacare? Do the remarks fit the machinations of the founders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the activities of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) disclosed in their 6000 leaked emails? It is instructive to know that Professor Gruber’s health care models are inaccessible, protected as proprietary.

The author of the quote was a leader whose lies and deceptions caused global disaster, including the deaths of millions of people. In a complex deception, the IPCC established a false result, the unproven hypothesis that human CO2 was causing global WARMING, then used it as the basis for a false premise that justifies the false result. It is a classic circular argument, but essential to perpetuate the phony results, which are the basis of all official climate change, energy, and environmental policies.

They successfully fooled the majority and even though many are starting to ask questions about contradictions, the central argument that CO2 is a demon gas destroying the planet through climate change, remains. There are three phases in countering what most people understand and convincing them of what was done. First, you have to explain the SCIENTIFIC METHOD and the hypothesis they tried to prove, instead of the proper method of disproving it. Then you must identify the fundamental scientific flaws, in a way people understand. Third, you must anticipate the next question, because, as people grasp what is wrong and what was done, by understanding the first two stages, they inevitably ask the basic question skeptics have not answered effectively. Who did it and what was the motive? You have to overcome the technique so succinctly portrayed in the cartoon (Figure 1).

The RESPONSE must counteract all the issues detailed in Adolf Hitler’s cynical comments, but also the extremely commendable motive of saving the planet, used by the IPCC and alarmists.

Figure 1

There are several roadblocks, beyond those Hitler identified. Some are inherent to individuals and others to society. People want to believe the best in people, especially if they have certain positions in society. Most can’t imagine scientists would do anything other than honest science. Most assume scientists avoid politics as much as possible because science is theoretically apolitical. One argument that is increasingly effective against this CONCERN is funding. Follow the money is so basic, human greed, that even scientists are included.

Most find it hard to believe that a few people could fool the world. This is why the consensus argument was used from the start. Initially, it referred to the then approximately 6000 or so involved directly or indirectly in the IPCC. Later it was converted to the 97 percent figure concocted by Oreske, and later Cook. Most people don’t know consensus has no relevance to science. The consensus argument also marginalized the few scientists and others who dared to speak out.

There were also deliberate efforts to marginalize this SMALL GROUP with terminology. Skeptics has a different meaning for science and the public. For the former they are healthy and necessary, for the latter an irritating non-conformist. When the facts contradicted the hypothesis, namely that temperature stopped rising while CO2 continued to INCREASE, a more egregious name was necessary. In the latter half of the 20^thcentury, a denier was automatically associated with the holocaust.

Another form of marginalizing, applied to minority groups, is to give them a unique label. In climate, as in many other areas where people keep asking questions for which they receive inadequate answers, they are called conspiracy theorists. It is why I prefer the term cabal, a secretive political clique or faction, named after the initials of Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale, ministers to Charles II. Maurice Strong referred to the cabal when he speculated in 1990,

What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries?…In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?

The motive emerged from the cabal within the Club of Rome around the themes identified by their founder, scientist Alexander King, in the publication The First Global Revolution. They took the Malthusian argument that the population was outgrowing food resources and said it was outgrowing all resources. The problem overall was bad, but was exacerbated and accelerated by industrialized nations. They were later identified as the nations in Annex 1 of the Kyoto Accord. The objective to achieve the motive was to reduce industrialization by identifying CO2 as causing global warming. It had to be a human caused variable that transcended national boundaries and therefore could only be resolved by a world government, (the conspiracy theory). Two parallel paths required political control, SUPPORTED by scientific “proof” that CO2 was the demon.

All this was achieved with the political and organizational skills of Maurice Strong. Neil Hrab explains how Strong achieved the goal.

How has Strong promoted concepts like sustainable development to consume the world’s attention? Mainly by using his prodigious skills as a networker. Over a lifetime of mixing private sector career success with stints in government and international groups, Strong has honed his networking abilities to perfection. He can bring presidents, prime ministers and potentates from the world’s four corners to big environmental conferences such as the 1992 Rio Summit, an environmental spectacle ORGANIZED by Strong and attended by more than 100 heads of state.

Here is a simple FLOW CHART of what happened at Rio.

The political structure of Agenda 21 included the environmental catch-all, the precautionary PRINCIPLE, as Principle 15.

In order to PROTECT the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to PREVENT environmental degradation.

What reads like a deep concern for doing good, is ACTUALLY a essentially a carte blanche to label anything as requiring government intervention. The excuse for action is the unassailable “protect the environment”. Who decides which State is capable? Who decides what is “serious” or “irreversible”? Who decides what “lack of full scientific certainty” means?

Maurice Strong set out the problem, as he saw it, in his keynote speech in Rio in 1992.

“Central to the issues we are going to have to DEAL with are: patterns of production and consumption in the industrial world that are undermining the Earth’s life-support systems; the explosive increase in population, largely in the developing world, that is adding a quarter of a million people daily; deepening disparities between rich and poor that leave 75 per cent of humanity struggling to live; and an economic system that takes no account of ecological costs or damage – one which views unfettered growth as progress. We have been the most successful species ever; we are now a species out of control. Our very success is leading us to a dangerous future.”

The motive was to protect the world from the people, particularly people in the industrial world. Measure of their damage was the amount of CO2 their industry produced. This was required as scientific proof that human CO2 was the cause.

From its inception, the IPCC focused on human production of CO2. It began with the definition of climate change, provided by the UNFCCC, as only those changes caused by humans. This effctively sidelined natural causes. The computer models produced the pre-programmed results and everything was amplified, and exaggerated through the IPCC Summary for Policymakers. The deception was very effective because of the cynical weaknesses Hitler identifies, the natural assumption that nobody could deceive, on such an important issue, and on such a scale, but also because most didn’t know what was being done.

People who knew, didn’t think to question what was going on for a variety of reasons. This situation makes the statement by German meteorologist and physicist Klaus-Eckert Puls even more important.

“Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data – first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it.”

Puls commented on the scientific implications of the deception when he said,

“There’s nothing we can do to STOP it (climate change). Scientifically, it is sheer absurdity to think we can get a nice climate by turning a CO2 adjustment knob.”

Now, as more and more people learn what Puls identifies, they WILL start to ask, who did it and what was the motive. When you understand what Adolf Hitler is saying in the quote from “Mein Kampf” above, you realize how easy it was to create the political formula of Agenda 21 and the scientific formula of the IPCC. Those responsible for the formation, structure, research, and FINAL Reports, easily convinced the world they were a scientific organization making valid scientific statements. They also quckly and easily marginalized skeptics, as the leaked CRU emails exposed.

Do you have another or better explanation of a motive?

Wind Energy makes NO Sense…No Gain, Only Pain!

November 22, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

The Economics of WIND ENERGY
Local Business & Economics Professor Urges Huntington County Plan Commission to Not Allow Wind Farms

The following are the remarks of Jim O’Donnell, Professor Emeritus of Business and Economics, Huntington University. This presentation on “The Economics of WIND ENERGY” was given to the Huntington County Planning Commission, on Wednesday, November 12, 2014. His remarks are published here, in their entirety, with his permission.

“Greetings and thanks.”

“I’m speaking tonight as an adopted son of Huntington Co. But as that adopted son, I have struggled to understand why my chosen homeland would develop WIND ENERGY in the southeast part of the county. I guess it’s for the tax revenue, the few jobs that will come with it, and the lease payments to the severalfarmers who will permit turbines on their land. But as an investor and economist, I feel a little like the auto mechanic who’s being shown a car that a good customer wants to buy. Mechanically and economically, the purchase makes no sense to me, the mechanic, at all, but the buyer insists that he’ll get so many credits for buying the car that even if it never starts, he’ll make a bundle.”

“Warren Buffett is no auto mechanic or USED CAR salesman, but his name is known by many as a great investor. He’s chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and makes enormous bets on companies we all know, companies like Coca Cola, Wells Fargo, GEICO INSURANCE, Fruit of the Loom, Heinz Ketchup, Dairy Queen, and many more. He’s very smart and is, arguably, the most successful investor alive, maybe of all time.”

“He’s made about $15 billion dollars of investments in wind and solar energy in Iowa and Wyoming, according to financial publisher Bloomberg. He’s planning on INVESTING $15 billion more elsewhere in America. Soon.”

“His wind investments, he says, have treated him especially well. But they’ve treated his tax liabilities even better.”

“The June 4th, The Wall St. Journal quoted him before an audience in his hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. He said, “I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire’s tax rate. For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.””

“Those are not the words of, say, Sally and Joe living in Huntington County. No, Buffett is one of the richest men in the world, one of the shrewdest investors in the world, too, whose team has analyzed wind energies economic and investment possibilities with a fine-toothed comb. And he finds WIND ENERGY, essentially, an economic wasteland, save for the tax credits. Now if Buffett thinks that, why would Huntington be making investments in WIND ENERGY? Because the county will increase its tax revenues, even if only by benefiting from tax breaks to the very rich, paid for my ordinary taxpayers. It simply does not make sense. I don’t even think it’s right. But it makes sense for Buffett and for Huntington County because their bottom line is increased.”

“Let’s try to understand Buffett’s and other very wealthy people’s attitudes towards “the tax credits” from wind energy? If we understand, then we’ll understand why Huntington Co. might be willing to help rich people take more from the government breast at taxpayers’ expense.”

“Back in 1992, Congress created the Wind Production Tax Credit, or the “PTC,” a small tax credit of about 2c per kilowatt hour that today is an even smaller $23 per megawatt of wind electricity generated, to nurture energy production in the then-infant wind energy industry. Earlier, government supported those who build structures, not energy production. Today, at least the incentive is the production of energy. Government incentives, like the PTC, are often used to promote young but crucial industries. That’s not the problem with the PTC.”

“The history of the PTC has been an off and on credit, renewed since 1992 by Congress for a year or two at a time. Then, it expires and fans of wind [no pun intended] get it renewed. It expired again last Dec. 31st. If we were to look at an honest graph of investments made in wind, we would see that it rises with the credit and collapses with its expiration. Moreover the infant industry it is meant to encourage is now more than 30 years old, kept alive by U.S taxpayers who keep paying to make it attractive for rich investors.”

“It’s important, too, to realize that the PTC can only be taken against “passive income” – that is, income from other investments by rich people and big companies. Wall St. bankers put together investors who want tax write-offs, which are provided by the PTC. Recall Buffett’s words: “we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them.””

“Approximately $24 billion of Federal subsidies have poured into wind energy since its beginning over 30 years ago. These credits limit funds that might help find really viable sources of alternative energy. In other words, as an investor myself, I’m saying the PTC is a misplaced bet. The PTC actually blocks funding for other green energy technologies that hold more promise. Rather than helping another infant, but worthy technology, the PTC is a handout to rich people and WALL STREET.”

“But government largesse does NOT end with the PTC. Not by a long shot. Not in a government as friendly to green energy and as hostile to fossil fuels as the Obama administration is. In fact, rarely has a multi-decade old infant industry enjoyed such disproportionate favoritism. Even though the wind industry produces currently only about 3.5 to 4% of the country’s electricity, it receives 42% of the federal government’s electrical financial support.”

“Combined with other targeted incentives, the federal government, in fact, gives wind producers $56.29 per megawatt-hour, according to the federal government’s own Energy Information Administration – the “EIA”. By comparison, natural gas, oil, and coal power generation only get 64 cents per megawatt, while nuclear power receives $3.14.”

“Seemingly innocuous, the PTC gives wind companies $23 in subsidies for each megawatt-hour of electricity they produce. This money adds up quickly; it costs taxpayers billions of dollars every year; while wind energy also creates huge problems, too, with sound, noise, landscape blight, bird kill, bat kill and intermittentcy. On average, wind turbines are SPINNING only about 30% of the time and, ironically, can’t spin at all in high winds (Detroit Edison, DTE, to cite only one utility, turns their turbines off when winds exceed 45 mph.)”

“In addition to the support that wind power gets at the federal level, it gets huge support at many state levels, too. Currently, 30 state governments enforce mandatory purchases of wind, solar, or other green energies under so-called Renewable Portfolio Standards that require utilities to buy a certain percentage of their electricity from green sources, whatever the cost. This, of course, jacks up consumer’s electric rates.”

“We’ve all heard the saying, “there is no such thing as a free lunch,” and that APPLIES to government subsidies, too. When lawmakers give special tax breaks to their friends and favorite industries, they shift the tax burden onto everybody else left in the tax base. While subsidies may allow wind turbine makers to pump up their payrolls, such as putting a few people to work in Huntington Co., the rest of the economy suffers. Government subsidies divert labor and capital away from more productive areas of the economy, to those where cronies get richer, which slows overall economic growth – something I would think Hoosiers don’t like.”

“The PTC, when combined with federal and state benefits gives wind producers a great advantage over other energy producers. In fact, it exceeds half of electricity’s wholesale price in many areas of the country. True, more wind energy is being produced each year, and its cost, relative to other forms of electricity is becoming more competitive. But only because of massive subsidies and higher rates for consumers.”

“Federal and state subsidies are so high that they lead many wind farms to sell their electricity at a substantial loss, just to collect the tax credits. Many wind producers are literally paying utilities to buy their product — and yet they’re still turning a profit because the taxpayer foots the bill by providing credits and subsidies.”

“I have no ax to grind against the rich, but I don’t think their gains should come as a loss to great numbers of Americans through higher energy costs.”

“While wind’s tax credits may be great for Warren Buffet and his bottom line, it’s harmful for American taxpayers and very expensive to America’s energy consumers.”

“I really wish wind energy worked better. Many people, including me, think alternative energy, in time, will offer huge environmental benefits for our children and those who come after us. But right now, wind is a museum specimen of a government boondoggle, a monument to crony capitalism’s, a favor to the rich and powerful over the little guy or the average person.”

“Huntington Co. can MAKE MONEY on this, no doubt. We’ll get tax revenue, a few jobs, and a few farmers get lease payments for turbines on their property. Living off the government breast is just not how I want to make money and I think such activities fly in the face of Indiana’s character and Huntington’s, too, as a place that favors freedom and honest work. It’s won a reputation of late for free markets, low taxes, and for encouraging growth in the private sector. Indiana is and Hoosiers are enemies of senseless, wasteful spending. And Warren Buffett sees wind energy as senseless right now, except for the tax benefits it offers its investors. As conscientious, publicly-minded citizens of Huntington Co. who give of your own time and talents to consider what’s best for our county’s land, its people and its future, please don’t allow wind energy’s horrible economics to find a place to make a home.”

James O’Donnell
Executive-in Residence, emeritus standing

James M. O’Donnell received his UNDERGRADUATE DEGREE

from Brown University and his MBA

from Columbia University. Professor O’Donnell is a certified public accountant and spent many years as an executive in the FINANCIAL SERVICES INDUSTRY

with such firms as Fidelity Investments and the Dreyfus Corporation in Boston and New York, respectively.

Wynne and Her Merry Band of Miscreants, Robbing us Blind!

November 18, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

One month and one billion dollars more wasted…

I have to ask… where is the main stream media?

Kudos to the Toronto Sun for posting the story by Parker and Lufts who run the blog Wind Concerns Ontario. And of course Sun News for trying to get this across to the people of Ontario.

Are you aware that it only took 30 days for the Liberals to piss away yet ANOTHER ONE billion dollars (yes with a B! for Billion) in order to over pay for hydro production?

30 days and 1 billion dollars GONE! Pfffsst gone! If it’s any conciliation, for the previous 30 day period of September 2014, they only pissed away 800 million dollars to pay more than the actual market value of said produced electricity.

Wynne and her gang of liberal marauders have now successfully created a billion dollar a month money funnel, in order to fund their green energy scheme.

Can we predict November’s numbers? Another billion? Safe bet. And December? Another Billion? Yep. And on and on it will go.

Not ONE penny of that endless cycle of monthly missing billions per month will go to benefit the Ontario resident. NOT ONE PENNY!

Are you queasy yet? Or hopefully you are angry.

No money for sick kids, no money for diabetics, no money for road infrastructure and no money for non Liberal causes. LOTS AND LOTS of billions though for the sucking black hole of grossly expensive and unnecessary green energy projects and their owners.

We can no longer continue to give these slugs a free pass while we are being robbed blind by this Green Energy disaster. Who’s with me?

Feel free to link or share via social media. Please do not alter. Thanks.

Great News! Useless Wind Turbines May Soon Kill the Wind Industry!

November 16, 2014 / 1957chev / Leave a comment

Faulty Turbines Sending Siemen’s Wind Power Division Broke as Samsung Cuts & Runs from Europe

November 16, 2014 by stopthesethings

German fan maker, Siemens has been running a huge propagandacampaign in South Australia over the last couple of weeks, surrounding the opening of the extension of the Snowtown wind farm – wheeling in Australia’s 2011 Tour de France winner, Cadel Evans as their pet-pedal-powered mascot.

And its highly paid wind farm ambassador, Tim Flannery – Australia’s world-renowned (but self-appointed) long-range weather forecaster – has been on the front foot in the press in recent weeks screaming about imminent “global incineration”. Tim’s “solution”? Why more giant (Siemens) fans, of course!

Not that he makes much noise about it, but Tim sits on Siemen’s Sustainability Advisory Board and – true to the title – has been working flat-out to “sustain” Siemen’s ability to flog its fans in Australia – with a mix of hysterical hectoring and overweening political pressure – all built around the mystical ability of wind turbines to suck CO2 out of the sky and drop world temperatures on a made-to-measure basis. A bit like a heavenly thermostat, apparently.

Although, being a loyal and faithful servant of his German masters, Tim hasn’t limited himself to just being Siemen’s top fan salesman. Oh no – Siemens is in the Carbon Capture & Storage business – so Tim took tospruiking the merits of CCS as only a recent “covert” could.

This little “switcheroo” required Tim to bury his hitherto well-publicised revulsion to coal:

Interviewed in 2007, he likened the coal industry – which employs thousands of Australians and provides the vast majority of our cheap power generation – to those that had sold asbestos. He also argued their ‘social license to operate’ should be withdrawn. A year before, he wrote that ‘the old coal clunkers need to be closed as quickly as possible’ and proposed that they be replaced with hitherto unproven technologies like geothermal and wave energy (see this article for more).

One thing’s for sure, this boy knows how to sing for his supper!

Tim – an expert on extinct giant Australian marsupials – and obviously the first person you’d call when it came to water management issues – predicted right throughout one of Australia’s frequent, prolonged droughts – that it would be “hotter and drier forever”.

Check out his doomsday interview with Maxine McKew in 2005 – here – a classic example of how being wedded to a delusional belief in “Catastrophic Global Warming” overtakes history and science all in one breath. He kept that rubbish up – right until the floods started inQueensland in December 2010 – a totally normal La Nina related flooding event – preceding the three wettest years (on average) recorded since white settlement. In 2013, Adelaide – in the driest State – recorded one of its wettest Julys ever. Onya Tim!

If it was just a bit of good-ol-fashioned shamanism, you might forgive Tim for his over-blown rantings – but his doomsday drought prophecies came with a multi-$billion price-tag. Tim warned that Australian cities would all die of thirst: the “solution”? Massive desalination plants for Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Perth and Adelaide (all bar Perth’s were mothballed, no sooner than the concrete had set). Thanks Tim!

But this wasn’t all wasted effort on Tim’s part. Oh no, through his “it’s desal or death” mantra Tim was able to help “sustain” Siemens – itbagged a very big slice of the desal plant action.

But Tim may need to think about where his next meal is coming from, as his paymaster’s wind power division hits the wall. Not only did Siemens find itself in huge strife being convicted of bribery and corruption – leading to hundreds of $millions in fines (see our post here) – its wind turbine arm is losing money hand-over-fist. The problem?: Siemens turbines are suffering catastrophic bearing and blade failures, requiring urgent, wholesale replacements. Here’s Reuters setting out a little of Siemen’s escalating financial woes.

Turbine faults cost Siemens €223million
Wind Power Monthly
Patrick Smith
6 November 2014

GERMANY: Costs related to faulty wind turbines have hit Siemens’ results, forcing the wind division into a loss for both the fourth quarter and 2014.

The German manufacturer said it was impacted by EUR 223 million in charges for inspecting and replacing main bearings in onshore turbines, as well as repairing blades on both onshore and offshore turbines.

Head of the Siemens energy business Lisa Davis said: “The charge is related to inspecting and replacing bearings due to the early degredation in certain turbine models. We believe this is related to recent batches of bearings and we are in discussions with the supplier.”

She said that the blade degredation was due to “harsh weather conditions both onshore and offshore”. She added that Siemens has “implemented a design change for leading edge protection” for new blades and will be implementing a “similar retrofit” for existing blades.

These faults resulted in a loss for the wind division of EUR 66 million in the quarter to the end of September. This compares with a profit of EUR 179 million a year before. Revenue remained steady at EUR 1.62 billion.

For the year, the division made a loss of EUR 15 billion, compared to a profit of EUR 306 billion despite a 6% increase in revenue to EUR 5.5 billion.

Siemens has previously had issues with faulty blades and bearings. Blade breakages on a number of onshore turbines last year caused the curtailment of 700 turbines worldwide. And in 2010, the company was forced to carry out maintenance work on four offshore wind farms after it was discovered the bearings in the 3.6MW turbines’ were corroding.

In addition to the write down due to turbine faults in the latest quarter, the wind division’s performance was adversely affected by a lower profit contribution from the higher margin offshore business. The division’s margin slumped from 11.1% to negative 4% in the latest quarter.
Wind Power Monthly

One of the wilder claims made by the wind industry and its parasites is that wind power production costs will inevitably fall (sometime over the next space-time-continuum, apparently) – some fantasists even go so far as to claim that wind power is already cheaper to deliver than coal and gas-fired power – as to which, see our post here.

However, the fact that Siemen’s turbines – barely out of the factory – need wholesale bearing and blade replacement doesn’t bode well for claims that wind power production costs fall over time: a line that’s proved to be nothing more than hot air – as blades continue to fracture; and bearings, generators and gearboxes wear out twice as fast as predicted (see our post here). And more and more turbines spontaneously combust (see our post here). The cost of replacement is phenomenal (see our post here).

Bearings: The Achilles Heel of Wind Turbines
wattsupwiththat.com
Eric Worrall
26 August 2014

A few years ago, I used to know a senior wind turbine engineer. One evening, over a few beers, he told me the dirty secret of his profession:

“The problem is the bearings. If we make the bearings bigger, the bearings last longer, but making the bearings larger increases friction, which kills turbine efficiency. But we can’t keep using the current bearings – replacing them is sending us broke. What we need is a quantum leap in bearing technology – bearing materials which are at least ten times tougher than current materials.”

At the time there was very little corroborating online material available to support this intriguing comment – but evidence seems to be accumulating that bearings are a serious problem for the wind industry.

Siemens citing bearing failures as part of the reason for a substantial fall in profit:
http://www.offshorewind.biz/2014/05/07/siemens-energy-division-profit-down-54-pct/

In the announcement of the opening of a new Siemens research facility:
http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2013/03/19/siemens-wind-turbine-research/
“… The Brande test center would evaluate the main parts of their wind turbines such as main bearings …”

http://www.geartechnology.com/newsletter/0112/drives.htm (an attempt to make direct drive turbines, to reduce bearing wear) “… More accurately, it is typically the bearings within the gearbox that fail, in turn gumming up the gearbox, but that’s a story for another time. …”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burbo_Bank_Offshore_Wind_Farm
“… During summer 2010 Siemens decided to change the blade bearings on all 25 turbines as a pre-emptive measure after corrosion was found in blade bearings found on other sites. …”

Of course, there is the occasional video of catastrophic turbine failure:

And suggestions that the industry is trying to conceal the scale of the turbine fire problem:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2695266/Wind-turbine-fire-risk-Number-catch-alight-year-ten-times-higher-industry-admits.html

All of which creates an interesting question – just how much of our money is the government prepared to waste, to keep their wind dream afloat? If the costs are far greater than the industry admits, how long is the wind industry going to carry that additional hidden cost, before they try to push the costs onto taxpayers, or abandon wind technology altogether?:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2116877/Is-future-Britains-wind-rush.html

Wattsupwiththat.com

Meanwhile, in yet another sign the walls are falling off of the wind industry’s gravy train, Korean fan maker, Samsung has pulled the plug on its European operations; and appears set to abandon major projects on its home turf.

Samsung winds down European wind activities
Wind Power Monthly
Patrick Smith
16 October

SOUTH KOREA: Samsung Heavy Industries (SHI) has shut two of its wind energy offices in Europe and is downsizing its wind business in Korea.

A spokesperson confirmed that SHI has shut down wind activities at its Hamburg and London offices, but denied that the company was pulling out of wind altogether.

“We are now downsizing the [wind] business based on our new strategy. It has not been closed down,” she said. The company refused to comment further.

A source within the company said that SHI would still explore opportunities in Europe, but was unable to define what those activities would be.

Windpower Monthly reported in June that SHI was initiating a review of its offshore activities in Europe.

The London office had been the base for the marketing of the 7MW offshore turbine, a prototype of which started operating in Scotland earlier this year. SHI said that the ship building division would continue to operate out of the London office.

While the spokesperson said that the offshore project is still alive, she was unable to point to any activity concerning plans to take the turbine into production.

Windpower Monthly spoke to a number of Korean employees that had been moved from their previous positions in the wind division to roles in the shipbuilding business.

Several employees said that SHI was winding down the division entirely, but the company said that this is merely a “rumour”.

The fate of the 7MW prototype at the Fife Energy Park in Scotland is unclear. A spokesperson for Fife council, which is running the project in conjunction with Scottish Enterprise, said that activities are continuing to certify the turbine. SHI said it is still operating an office at the energy park.

SHI also had plans to construct the 84MW Daejeong offshore wind project in South Korea, but it is not known whether it will go ahead with the development.
Wind Power Monthly

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